Museum For Non-Essential Art
Finally, after a long lockdown, non-essential shops have had their doors open again on April 28th 2021. But museums and cultural institutions remain closed. What does this say about the place art has in our society? With this in mind, We Are Public opened the Museum For Non-Essential Art which doubles as a shop. This way they want people to get thinking about what is essential and what is not.
They’ve asked me to combine my practise as an artist and commissioned photographer to make a piece of art for the exhibition which they could use for the campaign of the museum as well. I’ve set myself a number of rules in order to make an artwork of which the creative process would be visually interesting. The transformation from a product from the shop to an art object had to be done in one simple action in which I had to use different techniques, such as drilling, pulling and tearing. Within these rules there was a lot of room for experimentation.
The title of the work is Compulsive. It refers on the one hand to the way I treat the products with an irresistible urge to demolish and transform them into something meaningful. Which, I guess, in turn is a canalisation of my frustration about mass consumption being allowed once again, while going to a museum is still forbidden.
On the other hand it refers to and criticises our common compulsive shopping behaviour.
Commissioned by We Are Public
